


House of the Setting Sun

by hightechzombie



Category: BioShock
Genre: Angst, Dreams, Gen, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-22
Updated: 2016-08-22
Packaged: 2018-08-10 03:27:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,384
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7828681
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hightechzombie/pseuds/hightechzombie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In his dreams, Jack returns home. </p><p>There is no comfort in being unable to remember his parents' faces.</p>
            </blockquote>





	House of the Setting Sun

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Foxda](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Foxda/gifts).



Jack dreamed about home. A gentle breeze sending ripples through a cornfield. His home in the distance, his parents standing at the porch. They were waiting for him to come in, but it was a vain hope. The oppressive heat turned Jack’s limbs into lead - it was like trying to move underwater.

Struggling like an ant stuck in tar, Jack instead tried opening his mouth to call out to them, but there was no air to fill his lungs. Trapped and powerless, Jack was about gave up.

He made one last effort - a futile, sentimental gesture. He tried his best to memorize parents’s faces. Jack missed them so much that he could hardly breathe at times but he couldn’t recall their faces. It was shameful beyond words that Jack forgot them so soon, making it seem as if they had never existed.

But no matter how Jack strained his eyes, the heat twisted the air like a magician and distorted their faces beyond recognition. For a moment, their figures were twisted to look like Splicers. The image startled Jack and the dream frayed into oblivion.

He was propelled to the next dream fragment - the loud smoke filled bars of New York. Jack was playing a janky tune on an equally janky piano. The booze-filled audience wasn’t noticing him. In the first days it was a comfort that nobody noticed his mistakes, but now it felt suffocating.

Jack played louder and faster to overcome the noise. His fingers were running across the keys fueled by a sudden fear to be forgotten. New York was the city where people went to get lost, were the hapless village idiots got sucked of their juices until there was no more money made from their husks. Jack felt himself getting thinner. Soon the bowels of New York would absorb him and shit out his corpse in the river.

A senseless panic overcame him, even as Jack knew there was no substance to his fears. What was there to be afraid of? This wasn’t Chicago - Jack had a steady if not very profitable job and wasn’t starving. But Jack felt like drowning and he played as if his life was standing on it. If only he played good enough, he’d finally be noticed and rescued. Would cheat the impending death, would earn his spot in this city and would be allowed to stay.

Playing on a breakneck tempo, Jack soared for a few moments. He was no virtuoso, but the music flew from his fingers without a hitch. For a few moments Jack hoped that it all would work out. A smile was about to bloom on his face.

Then Jack stumbled as the notes returned all broken from the piano. In confusion, Jack pressed the keys harder but they stopped moving at all, as if they were stuck. Desperate, Jack tried the other keys up and down, but they failed him as well. Betrayed by his instrument, Jack lowered his arms in defeat.

In an instant, the hair on his neck stood up. Jack turned his head and saw the glowering stares and dark faces. Weapons glittered in their hands next to the drinks. The Splicers wore expressions of startled anger - Jack had ruined everything. Jack had ruined their evening and was now going to pay for it.

Something snapped inside Jack. The desperation turned inside out to transform into burning rage. Jack put on a mask of his own, a snarl that radiated challenge.

The bar went mad.

Jack remembered the fight in flashes. The yelp of the piano, as Jack smashed a man’s head against the keys. Then Jack being thrown against a table, breaking it in the process. Picking up a broken bottle and putting it to use - a woman screaming and holding up her hands to a useless bleeding eye. Finally, Jack wrangled a knife from one of the Splicers. It went quicker after that. He cut through the the Splicers like butter.

In the end, there was silence and the dripping of blood. The room was empty and Jack was too tired to notice the pain. He didn’t have the energy to wonder how easy it was to take on a room of Splicers. He just wanted to sleep.

A door slammed shut. Jack snapped from the dream and had no recollection how the gun appeared in his hand. Sitting up, he let a crust of ice form on his clenched fist. His traps were buzzing with electricity and there seemed to be nothing out of order. Still, Jack spent a few more minutes sitting there, making sure everything was fine. Eventually his heart stopped pumping adrenaline and slowed down to a normal beat.

Jack let the gun drop to the floor and unfroze his fist. The pain that had been numbed by the cold suddenly grew in intensity, as if his whole hand was on fire. With clenched teeth, Jack waited for Adam to regenerate skin tissue and for the pain to pass.

Tentatively, he shook his hand and kneaded it for a while. Adam rewrote your body, rewrote reality to impose your will and reshaped your body without care. After the effects of Adam faded, the body ached and complained about the violent change it went through.

Yet the pain was easily endured. There was no pain in the world that could be strong enough for you to stop yearning for more Adam. After Adam, Jack had understood why people do all these terrible things for the sake of power. Didn’t condone it, but he finally understood.

Jack sighed and rubbed his eyes. He thought about going to sleep, but his feet were as restless as his mind. There was no safe place where he could wander back and forth to shake off the unease. There was no safe thought to hold on to, no consolation to be found in this wet tomb. The past was slipping from him and the present made him miserable. The dreams kept coming back - the twisted faces of his parents, the mirage of his farmhouse and the blood dripping from the table of a small shabby bar.

And so Jack tried focusing on his real memories. His parents said goodbye to him at night on the train station, as he left for New York. They had never stood in front of the house, illuminated by the setting sun - except maybe for the time when they were taking the photo. That’s where the image must have come from, Jack realized.

Once he arrived in New York, Jack had worked a few odd jobs and got through fine, though it had been a very close call paying the bills a few months. Avoided trouble and didn’t acquire too many bad habits - although he did start to get a taste for smoking. He’d played piano for a few evenings in a bar, before the real musician returned and Jack had to find another job. The violent outburst that Jack dreamed had never happened - in fact, it was a very calm cozy place. He couldn’t imagine a single violent drunk wandering into that bar without the immediate urge to walk out right after.

His shoulder ached. It was the bullet that pierced his shoulder a few days. Maybe it didn’t heal right - but did EVE ever fail to heal a wound less than perfectly?

Maybe it was one of the phantom aches that kept haunting him. At this point, Jack felt like he was made of phantom aches and phantom memories. He saw ghosts of people that were long dead, absorbed their past through the shared DNA, but slowly began forgetting his own past.

Jack felt as if he was fake. He felt like he was drowning, like he was running through streets full of people and had no one to call for help, like he was playing piano in a crowded bar and waiting for the sharks to smell the blood.

He pressed his fingers against his eyes and tried to remember. He needed just one real moment, one piece of the past that doesn’t disappear like smoke between his fingers.

Smoke...

“Mister! Hey, mister!” The man smiled, when he saw that he finally caught Jack’s eye. “Would you kindly join me for a smoke?”

Jack had just left the factory he was working at, tired like a dog and only thinking of bed. But the man made him forget all that for a moment - a jovial, short man dressed in clothes that smelled of money.

They smoked together, on a dirty cobbled street, while the man - Mr. Schreiner - told Jack that he saw he was someone special. Earlier, Schreiner had been on an excursion through the factory and for some queer reason grew interested in Jack, impressed by his economy of movements and expertise.  

Schreiner had a plan, a big plan. In fact, the plan was so big that a short smoke on the streets wouldn’t last long enough to explain it all. Therefore Schreiner invited him to a restaurant, one of the prohibitively expensive places that Jack felt guilty just looking at.

The restaurant was an experience out of a different world. Bedazzled by the glamour of the place and pacified by the good food and drinks, Jack listened to Mr. Schreiner and listened. It was all crazy. Absolutely crazy. Schreiner wanted him to go to Germany, to advertise his factory models and to show investors how quickly the workers could operate Schreiner’s machinery. Jack was supposed to be some sort of salesman -  a salesman! - and all of Jack’s attempts to convince Schreiner that he was no good at smooth talking, that Jack was a simple farmer boy that had no clue how to talk to big men with big money, achieved nothing.

“It’s exactly why I need you!” said Schreiner, poking his fork in Jack’s direction and grinning like a cat. “You are a honest American boy. You embody the very spirit of this country! They’ll eat you up like a honeycake.”

Then Schreiner ordered more wine, after which the evening blurred into irrecognition.

“Jack, my boy, would you kindly try the liver? It’s delicious.”

Jack smiled at the memory. He felt an echo of his dumbfounded surprise, his budding pride and joy. It was a good time. He could vividly imagine the restaurant of their first meeting - the soulful singer, weaving her music in the background, the lush red drapes and snow white tables. Once, Rapture must have looked like this - before greed and cruelty had ruined it.

Upon leaving New York, Jack suddenly fell in love with the city. He wandered the city, trying to remember as much of it as he could before his departure. It was a surreal time for him. In the first days after meeting Schreiner Jack had been waiting for someone to tell him it’s a joke, that it was all a ruse to cheat him out of his money and that he’d been had like a total idiot.

But there was no trick - Schreiner bought him tickets, gave him brochures and instructions, and prepared him for Germany. And his parents send Jack a gift and a letter, telling Jack how proud they were of him and that they always believed in him.

Jack felt the smile on his face disappear again. With pained sigh, Jack covered his face. Why did he feel so empty? Why did the mention of his parents make him ache so much? What was wrong with him?

The longer he stayed here, the more he dreaded sleeping. The nightmares made him wake up with a racing pulse, but it was the despair that followed those dream that wrecked Jack. Life was so much easier when Jack was up and killing splicers. Jack felt like a well-oiled machine when he blew someone’s head off. But he was also a farmer boy deep underneath and he didn’t understand nothing of this. At nights, Jack couldn’t play either role. He felt like he was being torn apart by contradictions.

Jack pressed his knuckles against his forehead and tried breathing slower. The heartache throbbed in chest, but Jack felt like he was getting it under control. When he felt certain, that he’d be capable of sounding normal, Jack picked up the radio.

Pressing a button, Jack halted in hesitation. He shouldn’t call Atlas for things like that. Jerking Atlas around 'cause he had a bad dream? What comes next? Will he start calling Atlas 'cause he hit a toe against the furniture?

But Atlas would understand what it’s like to be alone, buried under the sea. They only had each other for company and Jack needed Atlas to keep him sane.

For that reason, Jack called out and waited for a response. And waited. And waited.

Finally, the radio crackled and came to life.

“Jackie boy? You said something?”

“Yeah,” said Jack and fell silent. He tried searching for words, but none came.

“Well,” drew out Atlas. “Is there something wrong? You in trouble?”

“No. No, I’m fine.”

“Alright,” said Atlas. “So let me guess - you wanted to talk?”

“Yes, I did. Atlas, I… I needed to…” Jack faltered and let the sentence fade away.

“Tell me about your parents. Tell me about what your childhood was like,” finally said Jack.

Atlas understood.

“My ma said I was kissed by a leprechaun as a doodlebug. Gotten myself in all sorts of trouble as a kid, fell of a tree at least three times and never gotten as much as bruise. Ma swore on everything from Jesus to napkins that she aged ten years due to me alone - and I had a bunch of more siblings who weren’t saints either. One day, my sister Ailis, she went and…”

Jack listened with closed eyes, vividly imagining everything Atlas told him. He chuckled in the right spots and felt the seeping cold leave his bones.

Everything Atlas said felt real, more real than anything Jack remembered. It was a comfort and solace. Jack wasn’t alone. There was a world out there, a world that waited for him to come back and a home to return to.

Unlike Atlas, Jack still had his family waiting for him. Alive and safe, standing on a porch of house and illuminated by the setting sun.


End file.
